My Extensive Coupon Binder and Dan's Ankle Injury

Some money-saving blogs that I have been following have recently motivated me to better organize my grocery coupons using a coupon binder. I purchased a zippered trapper keeper type binder, baseball card holders, tabbed dividers, and pencil pouches as basic supplies to create my binder. Although it took several hours to assemble initially, I am pleased with the outcome and have found it to be very easy to skim my coupons quickly at home or at the store to determine whether I have a coupon for a needed product or not and to easily view the expiration date of each coupon. The binder has also helped me keep my CVS coupons/deals better organized. Recently my CVS deals have included coming out $2.00 ahead on purchasing 4 bags of Dove chocolate candies, and spending $1 on 2 large packages of Stayfree pads, 1 container of 240 babywipes, and 2 big packages of gum. I thought it might be easiest to show some photos of my binder than to try to describe how I organized it:

The cover of my zippered binder

To the left is an accordion-type file which has CVS's weekly and monthly ads, Walgreens' EasySaver booklet, and any other fliers I might need for reference.
To the right is a zippered pencil pouch containing "must use" coupons like freebies, scissors, and a calculator. Behind this pouch is another pencil pouch containing my CVS coupons and manufacturer coupons that I will use at CVS.

I used 10 tabbed dividers to categorize/organize my coupons like "Frozen", "Drinks", "Toiletries", etc. And, yes, I did use my labelmaker to print labels for these tabs-
I LOVE my labelmaker! :)

I bought trading card holder pages at Target to file my coupons in.
There are about 80-90 pages of 9 coupons/per in my binder at this point.Am I a total coupon nerd or what??

Dan played tennis (or I should say tried to play tennis) this evening with Doug. Unfortunately he landed oddly on his right ankle and heard an unpleasant sound (never good) only a few minutes into their game. Dan returned home just in time for his ankle to swell up, and he could not put any weight on it. I called around to local pharmacies trying to find a place to rent crutches so that Dan could be mobile for work on Monday, but found that Sunday night at 7pm was not the best time to try to get ahold of a pharmacist. The only 24-hr pharmacy that we have locally (that I am aware of) is CVS, and they do not offer the service of rental crutches. You have to buy them, and they are pretty expensive. Since Dan wasn't planning on needing them again, we decided to wait and "rent" them from a Kroger pharmacy when it opened on Monday, so Dan didn't go in to work. That was probably just as well since he was in a decent amount of pain and really needed to keep his ankle elevated. I say "rent" in quotes, because Kroger offered this awesome service where you put a deposit down to rent the crutches, and the deposit is refunded in its entirety when you return the crutches. How great is that? Thankfully (as I'm typing this a couple of weeks later), his ankle healed just fine.